Sunday, 13 June 2010

Phobias...

I know that "irrational fears" (they're anything but irrational, but let's not get into that), are no laughing matter for those who experience them, but this one made me chuckle:

Angrophobia - Fear of becoming angry

Can you imagine? I mean to say, getting angry is one of the most obvious and, dare I say, natural (clearly I do dare say), reactions to stimuli. I would argue that it's one of the first reactions that most people make resort to. But, somewhere along the way, someone (society in general, I think, which seems to view anger as indicative of something aberrant), has installed a trigger that leads one to be fearful of venting one's feelings in an overtly angry way...

9 comments:

If I held in my anger because I was scared of being angry, I would explode into a thousand pieces. Gosh, I can't even imagine that. It would be awful. You would simply have all this pent up un-released anger, that had nowhere to go. Can you imagine the explosion if one ever let that amount of anger out :-/Sarah xx

Sadly, I don't have to imagine it - I've met a lot of people who offload their anger inappropriately. As you suggest, it tends to build up as they suppress it, until they explode disproportionately at something (or somebody), apparently insignificant. And then there's the justification of the outburst, which usually involves the person at whom the anger was finally vented being completely at fault for "causing" the outburst.

Yep - those "red rages" are a thing to behold - I'd feel badly for those people if I hadn't been on the receiving end so often!

Bob: Yes, needles... I can't remember what that's called, but I remember seeing it, as I scanned down a list on a webpage I found (yeah, whatever - I had nothing better to do!).

Some people believe that they have identified an event that gave rise to their fear. For example, I met a woman who had a fear of snakes, which she fixed on an occasion when, on a school trip, she was ordered into the Reptile House, at London Zoo, against her will.

To be honest, I don't think it's important, much less necessary, to identify the event (if indeed that is what gave rise to the fear). "Deal with what's in front of you," is my motto. I mean, if you're not foaming-at-the-mouth phobic of needles in the arm, it hardly matters, anyway. And even that would only be important if you regularly had to have jabs in your arm.

So, unless it severely impacts your day-to-day life, I'd be tempted to leave things well alone. There are plenty of "phobia cure" exercizes that one can do to undermine fearful thoughts, and they seem to work quite well, but I think I'd satisfy myself that there was a need to even bother, first.

Anonymous: When you write "you," I imagine that you mean "one," in which event, are you generalizing for your own case? Anyway, the whole thing is a lie, and I'm not about to validate that lie by entering into a discussion as though what you say is True. I used to do that, but seeing as people seem disinclined to enter my reality, I see little point in entertaining theirs.

Bob: You've thought about this a great deal, haven't you? You've even narrowed it down to the specifics - the needle puncturing the skin.

Well, the NLP QPC (Quick Phobia Cure), relies on distorting a person's recollection of an event, but not necessarily in the obvious way of dealing directly with the thing complained of (in this case, injections), but by introducing a whole bunch of seemingly unimportant details. For example, we could discuss the nurse, or the room in which you had the injection. If Wayne Rooney were to give you an injection, on the centrespot at Soccer City before the World Cup Final, would that have the same effect? Or if Angus gave you an injection, live on the stage at the NEC?

Even though you know that neither of these possibilities has happened, or is likely to happen, the suggestion is there, and one's perception changes, as a result. So the theory goes, anyway.

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